Easy come, easy go. Less than a week after HSBC said it would book a $2.6bn profit from the sale of its stake in insurer Ping An, the bank confirmed it is to pay a $1.9bn penalty to US authorities in relation to money-laundering lapses centred on its Mexican unit.

The settlement could knock about 11% off the bank's earnings for 2012. Yet the price of its Hong Kong-listed shares hardly budged Tuesday.

The bank had already managed expectations that a big payment was coming, warning in early November that its money-laundering bill could be $1.5bn or more. The announcement also removes the prospect of something much worse and lets HSBC potentially draw a line under the issue. The bank says it has toughened its compliance regime, with senior legal hires and a beefed-up anti-money-laundering unit as well as reviews of standards and controls. This will be costly. HSBC acknowledged at least $990mn of spending on measures to fix the problem systems.

The jury is out on how its reputation fares. The big test now is how the bank delivers on Chief Executive Officer Stuart Gulliver's ambitious plan to lift return on equity to 12% and reduce the cost-income ratio to 52% from 57.5%, both by the end of next year.

Nomura says the bank's targets are tough to achieve given the high cost of dealing with legacy businesses in the US, rising wage inflation in emerging markets, continuing restructuring and compliance costs and the limited scope for increasing revenue in a weak economic environment.

The bank's share price is hovering around the highest level of the past 52 weeks. It trades at about 1.3 times tangible book value-above the average of its peers-according to FactSet. Investors may be expecting some positive news on coming dividends. But at that rich valuation, HSBC can afford no more slip-ups.